Large meetings conducted either locally or in two separate locations with at least one of the locations involving two or more individuals can be facilitated using an audio system such as a room audio system or an audio conferencing system. Such audio systems typically include some number of wired or wireless microphones, at least one wired or wireless loudspeaker and a base station which can be connected to a local or wide area communication network. In such an audio system, microphones can operate to pick up acoustic energy corresponding to speech from a near side speaker and to transmit audio signals to a base station which generally operates to provide session control and to process the audio signals in a number of ways before sending it to either a local loud speaker or to a remote audio conferencing device to be played. Among other things, the base station can be configured with functionality to amplify audio signals, to regulate microphone signal gain (automatic gain control or AGC), to suppress noise, and it can be controlled to mute an audio signal captured by one or more microphones associated with a local or remote audio system.
FIG. 1 is a diagram showing functional elements comprising a an audio system 100. The audio system can be designed to operate locally in a meeting room setting, or it can be designed to transmit audio to a remote audio system over a network, in which case it can be an audio conferencing system. Regardless, the system 100 can be comprised of a number of wireless or wired microphones 120A-120C, one or more loudspeakers 110, and a server or base station 105. The wireless microphones generally operate to capture local acoustic energy information (voice and background energy) and send the acoustic information as an audio signal to the base station 105 which processes it in some manner before either transmitting the audio signal over a WAN to a remote audio system or sending over a LAN to a local audio system to be played.
Typically, in a room audio system, the loudspeakers 110 can be wired to the base station 105, and the base station is comprised of complex digital signal processing and audio signal control functionality. More specifically, the base station can include functionality to automatically control near side audio signal gain, functionality to control microphone sensitivity, audio signal muting, and system mode control (duplex/half duplex modes) to name only a few. Typically, both wired and wireless microphones include some sort of mechanism by which they can be muted. This mechanism can be a mechanical switch, or it can be any type of touch sensitive/capacitive switch positioned in a location on the microphone that permits a user to easily activate the switch to mute the microphone.